New Iconography: Artists Raising Children

Curated by Daniel Gerwin
March 27 - May 8, 2021

Left: Catherine Opie, Oliver and Stingray, C-print, 16" x 20”, 2004
Right: Matt Bollinger, Sick Night, flashe and acrylic on canvas, 20" x 16”, 2020

Artists

Eleanor Antin

Eleanor Antin works in photography, video, film, installation, drawing, performance, and writing. Many one-woman exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which traveled to St. Louis and toured the UK. As both a performing and exhibiting artist she has appeared in venues around the world including the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale and Opera House, and Documenta 12. She created a number of works that are considered conceptual, feminist classics such as "CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture,” “100 BOOTS,” her 3 personas (the King, the Ballerina and the Nurse) realized in a wide variety of media, and for the last decade and a half has been working on large photographic tableaux of narrative and allegorical scenes from an imagined ancient Rome, i.e. “The Last Days of Pompeii.” She has written, directed and produced many videotapes and films, among them the cult feature, “The Man Without a World”, 1991, (Berlin Film Fest., U.S.A. Film Fest., Ghent Film Fest., London Jewish Film Fest, etc.). Her work is represented in many major public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Beaubourg, the Verbund Collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, etc. She has written 6 books: BEING ANTINOVA (Astro Artz), ELEANORA ANTINOVA PLAYS (Sun & Moon), 100 BOOTS (Running Press), “MAN WITHOUT A WORLD: a Screenplay” (Green Integer, Sun & Moon Press), “CONVERSATIONS WITH STALIN” (Green Integer). Her new book “An Artist’s Life by Eleanora Antinova” was recently published by Hirmerverlag, Munich, along with a re-publication of “Being Antinova.” Major monographs on her work include The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “ELEANOR ANTIN,” "HISTORICAL TAKES” (Prestel) and “MULTIPLE OCCUPANCY: ELEANOR ANTIN’S SELVES” (Columbia University, NY). She received many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 from the Women’s Caucus of the College Art Association, 2 Best Show AICA Awards (International Assoc. of Art Critics), a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Achievement Award, and an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego.

Edgar Arceneaux

Edgar Arceneaux (b. 1972, Los Angeles) works in a variety of media; from drawing to film to sculpture to performance. Arceneaux has had solo exhibitions at the REDCAT; Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; SF MoMA; the Hammer Museum; and the Studio Museum Harlem. His work has also been featured at MoMA, NY, NY; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway; Performa 15, NY, NY; the Whitney Museum, NY, NY; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. His work is included in such public collections as the Whitney Museum, NY, NY; MoMA, NY, NY; the Hammer Museum, LA, CA; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Arceneaux is currently an Associate Professor at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, in Los Angeles.

JB Blunk

Working primarily in wood and ceramic, JB Blunk (1926–2002) developed a distinct style that drew upon the Japanese principle of directness as well as an unfaltering reverence for the qualities of natural materials. Taking archetypal forms and translating them instinctively through raw, salvaged materials, Blunk produced a body of work that represents an innate expression of, and conversation with, nature. From 1950, Blunk spent four formative years in Japan undertaking apprenticeships with master Japanese ceramicists Rosanjin Kitaoji and Toyo. In 1958 he settled in Inverness, CA, where he built a home and studio using salvaged materials for his family on an acre of land gifted from his friend and patron, the surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford. Producing both the structure and contents of the home single-handedly Blunk considered it to be his masterpiece. In the 1960s, Blunk began working with wood, first making stools and small tables and eventually earning commissions for large-scale pieces, public sculptures and environments. Throughout his career, he moved seamlessly between different disciplines and media: ceramics, jewelry, painting, weaving, furniture and sculpture. 

Blunk is represented by Blum&Poe (Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo), Kasmin Gallery (New York) and Kate MacGarry (London). His work has been exhibited widely, including a retrospective exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA (2018), and a two-person show with sculptor Alma Allen at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA (2018). A major monograph on the artist was published in 2020 by Blunk Books and Dent–De–Leone. Blunk’s work is featured in public collections worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; M+ Museum, Hong Kong, China; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others.

Matt Bollinger

Matt Bollinger received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Painting and Creative Writing and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Painting. His work has been exhibited in solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and elsewhere. Recent museum exhibitions have been at the South Bend Museum of Art (2020), the Schneider Museum (2018) and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne Métropole (2016). Residencies include the Seven Below Arts Initiative in Burlington, VT, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY. In 2016 he received a NYFA grant in Painting. He is represented by Zürcher Gallery and lives and works in New York state.

Patty Chang

Patty Chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects and impacted subjectivities. Her museum exhibition and book The Wandering Lake investigates the landscapes impacted by large scale human-engineered water projects such as the Soviet mission to irrigate the waters from the Aral Sea, as well as the longest aqueduct in the world, the North to South Water Diversion Project in China. Her most recent multichannel video project Milk Debt combines the act of lactation with people’s unspoken fears. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Times Museum in Guangzhou, China; and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She has received a United States Artist Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Fellowship, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. 

Harry Dodge

Harry Dodge is an American visual artist and writer whose interdisciplinary practice is characterized by its explorations of relation, materiality and ecstatic contamination. Dodge’s sculpture, drawing and video work has been exhibited at venues nationally and internationally, including solo shows: User at Callicoon Fine Arts (NY, 2019); Works of Love at JOAN (LA, 2018), a show which also traveled to Tufts University Art Gallery (MA, 2019); The Cybernetic Fold at Wallspace (NY, 2015); and Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT, 2013).

Group exhibitions include New Museum’s 40th anniversary exhibition TRIGGER (2018); and Hammer Museum’s 2014 Biennial, Made in LA. Dodge’s work is in collections including Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), Hammer Museum (LA). His collaborative video work was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and is part of the collection at Museum of Modern Art (NY). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017.

 His recent book, a work of literary non-fiction entitled My Meteorite: or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing (Penguin Press, US; Harvill Secker, UK) was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice in 2020.

Dodge holds an MFA from Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and is currently Co-Program Director (Art) at California Institute of the Arts.

Tony de los Reyes

Tony de los Reyes lives and works in Los Angeles. His paintings and works on paper explore the complexity of the US-Mexico border; originally drawing inspiration from Google Earth satellite images, it has since evolved into a closer inspection of the border, the walls that define it, and its history-laden topographies. He is a recipient of the City of Los Angeles (COLA) grant and California Community Foundation Fellowship. Reviews and articles include Artforum, Art in America, X-TRA, Modern Painters, and the Los Angeles Times. His work has been exhibited internationally, and is in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. He received his MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Amir H. Fallah

Amir H. Fallah creates paintings, sculptures, and installations that utilize personal history as an entry point to discuss race, representation, the body, and the memories of cultures and countries left behind. Through this process, the artist’s works employ nuanced and emotive narratives that evoke an inquiry about identity, the immigrant experience, and the history of portraiture.

Fallah interrogates systems of representation embedded in the history of Western art. His ornate environments combine visual vocabularies of painting and collage with elements of installation to deconstruct material modes of identity formation. Portraits of veiled subjects capitalize on ambiguity to skillfully weave fact and fiction, while questioning how to create a portrait without representing the physicality of the sitter. While the stories that surround his subjects are deeply personal and are told through the intimate possessions they hold most dear, his work addresses generational immigrant experiences of movement, trauma, and celebration. Fallah wryly incorporates Western art historical references into paintings formally rooted in the pattern-based visual language of Islamic Art. In doing so, his paintings possess a hybridity that reflects his own background as an Iranian-American immigrant straddling cultures.

Fallah received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; San Diego Art Institute; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS.

In 2009, the artist was chosen to participate in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. In 2015, Fallah received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2019, Fallah’s painting Calling On The Past received the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago. In 2020, Fallah was awarded the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and the Artadia grant. In addition, the artist had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson and a solo exhibition, Remember My Child..., with Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles. Fallah has a forthcoming exhibition with the ICA San Jose.

The artist is in the permanent collection of the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami; McEvoy Foundation For The Arts, San Francisco; Nerman Museum, Kansas City; SMART Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; Davis Museum, Massachusetts; The Microsoft Collection, Washington; Plattsburg State Art Museum, NY; Cerritos College Public Art Collection, CA; and Salsali Private Museum, Dubai, UAE; Lonsford Collection at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.

Victoria Fu / Matt Rich

Victoria Fu (b. Santa Monica, CA) and Matt Rich (b. Boston, MA) began a collaborative studio practice in 2017, alongside their individual practices. Fu received her B.A. in Art from Stanford and M.F.A. from CalArts, and is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow; Rich received his B.A. in Art from Brown University and M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a Terra Foundation and Howard Foundation Fellow. Both attended Skowhegan in 2006 and 2010, respectively. This partnership between a moving image artist (Fu) and a painter (Rich) combines their aesthetic sensibilities and working processes, resulting in collaborative works that have been in group exhibitions including New Visions: Triennial of New Photography at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, Norway, and at venues such as The Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; Document, Chicago, IL; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY; and La Jolla Athenaeum, La Jolla, CA. They have had recent solo exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA, where they also collaborated with artist Matt Savitsky and Dancehaus to program two distinct performances activating the objects in exhibition; Station Gallery at the University of Southern California Roski School of Art + Design, Los Angeles, CA, and University Hall Gallery at University of Massachusetts, Boston, where artist Marcus Civin was commissioned to create related performances; The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI; and Angels Gate Cultural Center; San Pedro, CA. In 2017, their collaboration was awarded the San Diego Art Prize. They live and work in San Diego, CA, where they are professors at the University of San Diego.

Daniel Gerwin

Daniel Gerwin is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. His 2019 solo show was reviewed in the LA Times, and his work has been written about in Frieze, ArtCritical, Hyperallergic, and other publications. He has curated two previous exhibitions in Los Angeles, taught painting, drawing, and theory, and writes regularly about contemporary art for Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic, as well as catalog essays and other exhibition texts. He received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, his BA from Yale University, and has taught at University of California Davis, University of the Arts, University of Iowa, and University of Pennsylvania. In 2004 he was awarded a residency at Blue Mountain Center, and in 2016 he was a Resident Fellow at the MacDowell Colony.

Julian Hoeber

Julian Hoeber (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) holds a BA in Art History from Tufts University, Medford, MA, a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA and an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Hoeber is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on themes such as the problem of the proximity of thought and form, intuitive processes within geometrical compositional systems, and the quest to combine conceptualist strategies (mind) with that which is experiential (body).  For Hoeber, many of the binary categories used to define art, culture, and social relations are non-functional or imperfect.  Rather than operating as polarities, categories such as interior and exterior, psychic and somatic, rational and irrational, are able to occupy the same space in his work. Hoeber harnesses rigor and exactitude in service of the emotional and idiosyncratic, revealing that his conceptual strategies and modes of inquiry are subjective and poetic. Going Nowhere, a years-long endeavor to design an architectural structure in the shape of the artist’s thinking is explored through tromp l’oeil paintings, architecturally inspired sculpture, and drawing. 

Hoeber’s work is featured in public and private collections internationally including Dallas

Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Rosenblum Collection, Paris, France; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Western Bridge Museum, Seattle, WA. Julian Hoeber lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 

Loie Hollowell

Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, Woodland, California) is recognized for her paintings that evoke bodily landscapes, using geometric shapes to move a figure or its actions into abstraction. Her work explores themes of sexuality, often through allusions to the human form with an emphasis on women’s bodies. An investigation of autobiography became evident in Hollowell’s early work, which explored the use of gradient staining techniques on cotton supports as a metaphor for intimate spaces—meditations on sleep and bodily fluids. These canvases evolved into figurative painting, introducing female nudes as subject matter as well as the use of reflection and mirroring. Her subsequent work exhibited a shift toward abstraction, characterized by radiating silhouettes and a pulsating color palette. With its strong colors, varied textures, and geometrical symmetry, Hollowell’s practice is situated in lineage with the work of the Transcendental Painting Group (1938–41), Georgia O’Keeffe, Gulam Rasool Santosh, and Judy Chicago.

Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.

Rebecca Niederlander

Rebecca Niederlander (b. 1965, USA) is a Los Angeles based visual artist, curator, and writer. She co-founded the social practice BROODWORK, which investigated creative practice and family life through exhibitions, lectures, written projects, and events. Her sculptures and site-specific installations are data visualizations that use repetition and the inherent nature of the materials to address the individual’s position within the larger intergenerational community.

Howard Fox wrote that the “endless connections, interceptions, overlaps, and mergers that define the growth patterns of Niederlander’s works are suggestive of not only the patterns of the physiological development of any living being but (by the extension of our focus on our own humanity) also of the aesthetic/intellectual/ spiritual evolution and transformation of our individual selves, values that Niederlander pursues in both her art and her personal life with a devotion not unlike a religious calling.”

Recent projects have included There's A Nova In the Bed next to Mine, in an official project for the 56th Venice Biennale in Italy, the solo exhibition Axis Mundi at the St. Louis Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, various public art projects for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and The Gravitational Pull of Satellites and Eclipses, a site-specific project for the Los Angeles International Airport. Niederlander’s writings has been published by Rizzoli Press among many others. Reviews and articles about her work include the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Architect’s Newspaper, Dwell, and LA Weekly. She has an MFA from UCLA and a BFA from California College of the Arts and is recipient of grants from the NEA, Culture Ireland, and Cornell U. among many. She is married with one son, whom she believes to be her greatest collaboration ever.

Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie (b. 1961 Sandusky, Ohio) received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 1988. In 2000, she was appointed Professor of Fine Art at Yale University. Opie accepted the position of Professor of Photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001, which she currently holds, and in 2019 was made the first endowed chair in the university’s Department of Art. 

Catherine Opie's photographs include series of portraits and American urban landscapes, ranging in format from large-scale color works to smaller black and white prints. Moving from the territory of the body to the framework of the city, Opie's various photographic series are linked together by a conceptual framework of cultural portraiture. 

Her work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. In 2017, a survey exhibition entitled Catherine Opie: Keeping an Eye on the World was on view at the Henie Onstad Art Center in Oslo. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus. In October 2016 she completed a monumental installation for the new Los Angeles Federal Courthouse. 

Opie has received numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship (2019); Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal (2016); Julius Shulman Institute Award for Photography (2013); Women’s Caucus for Art: President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement (2009); United States Artists Fellowship (2006); Larry Aldrich Award (2004); Washington University Freund Fellowship (1999); and the Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award (1997). 

Her work is included in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; among others. 

She lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Umar Rashid

Umar Rashid's portraits, drawings, flags, maps, battle scenes, and other artifacts continue the long history of Frengland—an ongoing project Rashid began working on in 2006. In Rashid’s history, the dates of the Frenglish Empire (1658-1880) roughly correspond to the actual English Civil War and the abolition of slavery in Brazil respectively. Fourteen years in the making and spanning almost 140 years of Frenglish time, Rashid’s global empire has developed a complex, global history, much like the trajectory of actual colonial enterprises. Similarly, his work references a panoply of cultures that collapses geography and time. Stylistically, Rashid alludes to Egyptian hieroglyphs, Native American hide paintings and ledger art, Persian miniature painting, and illustrated Spanish colonial manuscripts to name but a few. Rashid’s compelling cast of characters are diverse and often of mixed race and ethnicity. His world is not guided by simplistic dichotomies of white and black, master and slave, captor and captive, but challenges viewers to consider the range of humanity involved in a global empire. Thus, his people of color are just as likely to be heroes as villains, revealing the duplicity and complicity of these individuals but also acknowledging their agency as historical actors. The lengthy, sometimes humorous, titles of Rashid’s works often reference hip-hop song lyrics, urban expressions, and current events. The artist intentionally strives to bridge the gap between contemporary popular culture and “official” history, which often seems like a distant, untouchable past especially for many young people today. By making history relatable, Rashid reminds us of the cyclical nature of history and universality of the human condition.

Heather Rasmussen

Heather Rasmussen was born in Santa Ana, CA in 1982 and lives in Los Angeles. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA in 2007 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine, CA in 2004. Rasmussen’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the The Pit, Glendale, CA (2018); Weingart Gallery, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA (2015); California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA (2015); and Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA (2012). Her work has been featured in thematic exhibitions such as Solar Flare, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance (2018); Input/Output, Sycamore Gallery, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH (2014); Trouble with the Index, California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA (2014); Curious Silence, Brand Library & Arts Center, Glendale, CA (2011); 31 Women in Art Photography, Affirmation Arts Foundation, New York, NY (2010); and Salty Dog Bites the Hand, Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA (2008). Rasmussen’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Alison Saar

Alison Saar was born and raised in Laurel Canyon, California. Saar received her B.A. in studio art and art history in 1978 from Scripps College, Claremont, California, and went on to earn her MFA from Otis-Parsons Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design). She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1984, 1985 and 1988), and was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1989, the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists in 2000, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 1998 and the Joan Mitchell Artist in Residence in 2013. In 2012, the United States Artists Program named Saar one of 50 USA fellows. Select public works include Monument to the Great Northern Migration (Chicago, Illinois), Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial (Harlem, New York) and Embodied (Los Angeles, California). In 2021, the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, California will jointly present Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, an exhibition of the artist’s sculptures and installation-based work spread between both locations. Mirror, Mirror: The Prints of Alison Saar, an extensive traveling exhibition dedicated to her prints, is currently on view at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at UMass Amherst.

Amanda Valdez

Amanda Valdez has had solo exhibitions in New York at the Heckscher Museum of Art, Denny Dimin Gallery, in Miami at Dotfiftyone, in Tokyo at Koki Arts, in Massachusetts at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, and in Seattle at Prole Drift, and had a two-person show in Dallas at Circuit 12. She's been in recent group exhibitions at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles in Northern California. Valdez works in a matrix of gestures, styles, and materials while referring to visual cultures that are both Western and non-Western. She pulls on a variety of histories, from quilting and sewing to tiling and brick-laying, to virtuoso gestural painting. Her works operate as a reflection of the body, and the histories that the body holds in its physical makeup: scars, sags, symmetries and asymmetries, and a lifetime of emotions. Valdez has received artist residencies at the New Roots Foundation in Guatemala, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Byrdcliffe, the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. She's received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Hunter College, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was awarded the 2011 College Art Association MFA Professional-Development Fellowship. Valdez holds an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was born in Seattle and is currently based in New York City.